The Desert Healer

by E. M. Hull

Carew went on down the stairs with a faint smile at the oriental ambiguity with which the veiled warning had been conveyed to him. Though no name had been mentioned it was perfectly obvious who threatened him. He had thwarted the desire of no other Arab. But as he followed the negro again through the blackness of the winding passage he turned from the thought of that particular Arab with a shrug of annoyance. Abdul el Dhib was too intimately connected with what he wished to forget to allow him to dwell on the possible results of the horse-thief’s threats. Threatened men live long, and Abdul was in some ways wise in his generation. There seemed no need to take the warning too seriously and, besides, he was too deeply imbued with the fatalism he had learned in the desert to dread death that was always more or less imminent in the hazardous life he led. He had always held his life cheaply, there was no reason now to go out of his way to take precautions that would probably be unnecessary. He lived or he died as Allah willed—a comfortable creed he found amply sufficient.

Dismissing Abdul from his mind his thoughts reverted to the other as plausible but more clean-handed Arab he had just quitted. The intelligence the Sheik had imparted ought, without question, to be passed on to headquarters, and that as speedily as possible. Perhaps tonight he would find opportunity to approach the General on the subject—and Sanois; certain demands for the source of his information were going to be the very devil to parry.

The return journey through the dismal cellars seemed shorter than the first and Carew was not surprised when he was ushered into the outer world again to find himself, as he had expected, in a totally different street from that in which he had waited to gain admittance to the sinister-looking house. But the locality was known to him and very soon he was back in the rue Annibal, swinging quickly down the unusually empty street. Preoccupied he rounded a sharp corner without noticing the noisy clamour that ordinarily would have warned him of some special excitement in progress and came suddenly upon a yelling crowd of ragged youths and boys who fought and screamed and tore at each other as they surged round some central object that was hidden from him. The noise was deafening, the narrow roadway completely blocked, and Carew glanced at his watch with a gathering frown. He was late enough already, he had no mind to be further delayed by a band of young savages employed probably in their usual amusement of torturing some unfortunate dumb animal that had fallen into their clutches.

He was familiar with the callous cruelty of the Arabs, but familiarity had not lessened the abhorrence with which he viewed this particular pastime of the native youth. And the scowl on his face deepened as he sought to find some way of passing the squalid rabble who had taken possession of the footway. Argument was impossible, his voice would be drowned in the shrill cries that filled the air. Action, prompt and decisive, was the only expedient. Selecting a spot where the throng seemed less dense he gripped two of the taller lads, who were engaged in a private sparring match on the fringe of the crowd, and dashing their heads together drove them before him a living wedge into the heart of the press.

The unexpectedness of his attack made his task an easy one, and in the sudden silence that ensued he cursed them fluently and with picturesque attention to detail that left nothing to the imagination.

There were some who knew him by sight—he heard his Arab title uttered warningly—for the rest he was a representative of law and order whose coming put a period to their amusement. Before he had finished speaking they had begun to slink away and in a few moments he was alone in the again deserted street, looking down with a variety of feelings on the slim girlish figure crouched on the filthy cobblestones at his feet. Hatless, her white dress stained and crumpled, she seemed oblivious of everything but the pitiful little cur whose mangled bloodstained head lay on her knee. She was crooning to it softly, brushing the matted hair from its fast glazing eyes and stroking the broken palpitating limbs with tender caressing fingers. And when the tortured creature’s agony was over and she had laid the little dead body gently aside she still sat on motionless, shivering from time to time as she tried to wipe the crimson stickiness from her fingers with a scrap of lawn that was already a soaked red rag.

With a gesture of impatience Carew dropped his own larger and more adequate handkerchief into her lap.

“It is unwise to meddle with these Arab gamins, Lady Geradine.” He spoke curtly, his tone patiently disapproving, and at the sound of his voice she started violently. For a moment she scarcely seemed to breathe, then she stumbled to her feet looking up at him quickly and he saw the sudden bewilderment that leaped into her eyes as they travelled slowly over the length of his tall figure and then sought his face again to linger on the tell-tale scar across his cheek that gave her the clue to his identity.

“You are English,” she stammered, the colour rushing into her white cheeks. “I thought—that night—you were an Arab.” Then she flung her hands out to him with a little choking cry. “Oh, why didn’t you come sooner,” she wailed, “it was horrible! That poor wee beastie—those devils! You don’t know what they did—it nearly drove me mad—I can’t bear to see an animal suffer—” she broke off with a shudder and for a moment he thought she was going to faint and caught at her arm instinctively. But she pulled herself together, moving away from him slightly with a fleeting smile of acknowledgment.

“I’m all right, thanks, only it makes one—just a little bit—sick,” she said jerkily, her hands busy with her loosened hair, and looking about for her hat which had been torn from her in the scuffle. She spied it at last wedged in the grating of a window and rescued it with a rueful laugh that ended shakily. Brushing the dust marks from her tumbled dress she turned again to Carew. He was waiting with the detached air of aloofness she remembered so well and which sent a little chill through her, making her feel that again he had been constrained to render a service that was totally against his inclination.